STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Now, the epic investment in artificial intelligence is raising some big questions. Here are two. Where do we get the electricity to run all those new data centers? And once they're all built, what is AI going to do to society? Utah Governor Spencer Cox is one of the elected officials facing those questions. In his recent NPR video interview, he said Utah is promoting more nuclear power plants, yet he also said he worries about the consequences of AI and wants to preserve his state's power to regulate it.
What are you trying to do in Utah with nuclear power?
SPENCER COX: We're trying to build it, and lots of it. Back in the '50s and '60s, we built nuclear. We built it better than anywhere else in the world. We were the leaders in this technology - clean technology, cheap technology - and then we stopped doing it. So this is the mistake that we've made. Other places in the world kept doing this and doing it very well. We have to change this. It's happening - red states, blue states working together. The federal government finally gets it. They're working through the permitting process on nuclear as well. We can do it. We can get it done.
INSKEEP: What thoughts do you have about the downsides of the massive expansion, both of data centers and artificial intelligence?
COX: So the expansion of data centers, of course, is going to use an - a tremendous amount of energy. So that's a concern because that's going to raise prices if we aren't doing this. But it's a global arms race. If we don't do this, China and Russia are going to do it. And so we have to be able to compete, or we are at a significant disadvantage, not just an economic disadvantage but a true national security disadvantage.
Now, when it comes to the deployment of artificial intelligence as it impacts our kids and our families, our schools, the human-flourishing piece of this, we should also be incredibly cautious. I'm very worried about any type of federal incursion into states' abilities to regulate AI. We've seen how social media companies, the most powerful companies in the history of the world, have used this incredible tool to utterly destroy our kids and our families, their mental health, to use this in ways that have made them a lot of money and gotten people addicted to outrage. AI's going to be even worse.
INSKEEP: Pete Buttigieg raised this and talked about growing up in the Midwest, where over the course of 20 or 30 years, most of the auto jobs disappeared...
COX: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...And steel jobs and other kinds of jobs, and it was a phenomenal social burden and social problem. And he foresees possibly the same thing happening with AI, except not in 20 or 30 years - happening in three or four or five years.
COX: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Is that on your mind?
COX: This is going to be very different. Plumbers are going to do great. Attorneys are going to do very poorly. We've never had that kind of technological disruption. I don't know what that means. I'm just pointing it out - that it is going to impact a different segment of society than has in the past. And what we're trying to do in Utah is to adopt a human-flourishing model around AI to help companies understand that they have a responsibility not just to make money, but to actually make sure that their products make human life better for all of us and that we should be working closely together.
INSKEEP: Are those efforts going to be overwhelmed, though, if we're building more nuclear reactors to build more data centers, to deploy more AI at an unbelievable speed with billions and billions of dollars of investments?
COX: Yeah. Well, look, potentially. But there are certain things we can do and certain things that are just impossible to do. Like, that investment is going to happen. That building is going to happen somewhere, no matter what. And so we should make sure that it happens in the right way. It's really going to have to be regulators working closely with the AI companies to make sure that we're protecting our people.
INSKEEP: Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, in an NPR video interview. And the full video is at the NPR app and on YouTube.
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